Not really, but perhaps I’d have got an ‘E’ in Tech Drawing no matter how much I’d asserted myself. Maybe Mr. Pinkerton would have seen to it that my exam paper was tampered with. A spot of teacher to student revenge.

Proposed in 1908 as part of the new Latvian spelling by the scientific commission headed by K. Mīlenbahs, which was accepted and began to be taught in schools in 1909. Prior to that, Latvian had been written in German Fraktur, and sporadically in Cyrillic.

The letter E/e (like its long counterpart Ē/ē) represent two sounds, [ɛ] — šaurais e(“narrow e”) — and [æ] — platais e(“broad e”). In principle, [ɛ] is used when there is a palatal element (the vowels i, ī, e, ē, the diphthongs ie, ei, and the palatal consonants j, ķ, ģ, ļ, ņ, š, ž, č, dž, and, in the old spelling, ŗ) either in the same or in the following syllable; otherwise, [æ] is used. Unfortunately, some historical changes have obscured this pattern by removing some previously existing palatal elements; as a result of that, for a number of words the actual pronunciation of the letter e — [ɛ] or [æ] — must be memorized.

At the beginnings of many words, this letter takes on the sound of /je/ as in este(“he/she/it is”)/ˈje.ste/. This does not happen when the preceding word ends in a consonant, as in eleste(“he is”)/jelˈes.te/.